I live in Tamil Nadu, in a facility renowned for its top-class service and justly famous food. We are served morning coffee, breakfast, lunch, evening refreshments and dinner. The cost is Rs 400 per day per person. For a couple, the monthly food bill comes to Rs 24,000. Given that the urban Indian family spends roughly 40% of their consumption expenditure on food on average, a family of two would need to earn at least Rs 60,000 a month to afford this standard of living. This requirement places them in the top 5% of Indian households. It is established now, even by official data, that for 95% of the population, such meals are unaffordable.Tellingly, even within our facility, the cost is prohibitive for many families who have been forced to make alternative dining arrangements.To put this in a global context, consider California, where a standard Grande Starbucks Caffè Latte costs approximately $6. With over 2,000 retail locations across the state, Starbucks is hardly an elite restaurant. Yet an entire day of fine vegetarian dining would not buy two cups of its coffee in California. The reason for this disparity is that the wages for workers are a pittance in India, lower even than would be considered starvation wages in any better-off nation.Inequality is structuredBehind the seamless daily cycle of meals lies a chain of undervalued labourers. This includes the kitchen staff who arrive before dawn, the servers and cleaners working grueling shifts and, most of all, an agricultural supply chain where the farmers rarely turn a sustainable profit on the produce they grow.This reality exposes a truth: the comfort of the few in India is subsidised by the low wages and income of the majority. Our overall growth narratives are completely detached from the struggle for a living wage for the ordinary citizen, and this is true even in a historically progressive state like Tamil Nadu.Share of various food and non-food item groups in total expenditure: All-India. Source: PIB, government of India, January 2025.Notably, our facility is not dependent on migrant workers from the northern states, whose costs are even lower. Except for a couple of staff members, the workers here are local Tamils. The working class in Tamil Nadu generally enjoys a higher floor of dignity and far better health outcomes than their counterparts in many northern states. Yet, underneath this welfare cushion lies the exact same structural inequality found across the rest of India. Even India’s best-performing state models have failed to address the core issue – an economic system meticulously engineered to keep working people at barely subsistence level.Sanitation and gig workers in New York and DelhiTo see this more clearly, let us look at what a sanitation worker and an app-based food delivery rider make in New York City versus what their counterparts earn in Delhi. In New York City, working for the Department of Sanitation is a competitive municipal job with strong union backing. In contrast, safai karamcharis working in Delhi face a heavily fractured system split between a small minority of permanent employees and a massive pool of exploited contract laborers.An entry-level sanitation worker in New York earns a base salary of about $3,700 a month, which is approximately Rs 3.5 lakh. Meanwhile, a contract worker in Delhi receives about Rs 18,500, or around Rs 30,000 – but only for the rare worker with government status.Also read: The Plight of Gig Workers in IndiaFurthermore, within less than six years, the monthly income for a New York worker balloons to over $7,700 – around Rs 6.4 lakh – through structured raises. In India, the worker’s wage will merely crawl upwards, by 3% every year, reaching Rs 22,000 in six years, or Rs 32,800 for the more fortunate government-status worker.An entry-level sanitation worker in Manhattan makes more in two days than a contractual worker in Delhi earns in an entire month.The contrast in the gig economy is sharper. New York City has a mandatory minimum wage guarantee for app-based delivery work. Indian gig workers are not so fortunate.A gig worker in New York can realistically make between $3,500 and $4,500 per month—between Rs 3 lakh and Rs 4 lakh.Their counterparts in Delhi will be lucky to take home Rs 30,000. Effectively, a food delivery rider in New York City earns more in a single ten-hour weekend shift than an average gig driver in Delhi earns working all month.The Purchasing Power Parity mythTrue, a dollar in New York does not buy what a dollar buys in Delhi. That is why economists use Purchasing Power Parity (PPP), which is essentially a way to account for cost of living differences across countries. When economists apply this to India, they can show that India’s GDP per capita, which is an indicator of standard of living, has jumped from roughly $2,800 in nominal terms to about $12,800 in PPP terms.A figure like $12,800 looks comforting when seen on a graph. It may even lead people to believe that Indians are much better off than they really are. The mathematics of PPP adjustment works by measuring how much a basket of goods costs in different countries. If a kilo of rice or a local bus ticket costs a fraction of what it costs in New York, the formula adjusts the Indian worker’s purchasing power upwards.But what it really shows, without saying so, is that it is incredibly inexpensive to live in India – if all you want to do is barely survive. On the ground, PPP in India means adjusting for the cost of not starving, rather than exploring the true cost of living if “life” means anything beyond two or three meals a day and a shanty to return to at night.Also read: Is Poverty in India Really Down to 5% as Estimated by the World Bank?If a contractual sanitation worker who earns Rs 15,000 a month can buy food, that wage still leaves him in a state of absolute financial precarity. A single medical emergency can ruin his life – and that of his dependents. I am not suggesting that a working-class New Yorker lives on a bed of roses, but the Indian worker is trapped at the very bottom of the income pit. His capacity for savings is zero.The abysmal government employment sceneOne obvious way to mitigate the suffering of the working classes is to expand employment within state-run establishments. In Scandinavian social democracies like Norway, 30.9% of the workforce is employed in public service.In the United States, roughly 15% of the workforce is in the government sector (2021). The figures regarding government employees in India as percentage of total employees are anybody’s guess. The number ranges from 3.8% to 7.8%, depending on where you look for it. This is when more than 20% of existing sanctioned government posts are left unfilled.The institutional miserliness stems from two factors: the near-impossibility of terminating corrupt state officials and the fact that formal government employees are an exceptionally expensive proposition. While rationalising the salary structure would easily allow for expanded public employment without additional financial strain, governments at all levels – Union, state and local – have a deeply vested interest in preserving the status quo.A corrupt official serves as an essential lubricant for a massive, systemic political machine. Ultimately, it suits the political class to maintain these high-wage islands of government servants, using them as a conservative bulwark as buffer against a restive, underpaid mass of informal wage earners.While government employees in many developed nations earn a slight premium over their private-sector counterparts, the disparity is nowhere near as cavernous as it is in India. Even in Brazil and South Africa, which grapple with similar structural distortions, the wage differentials pale in comparison to India. In some sectors of the Indian economy, a government salary can be more than five times that of an equivalent private or contractual worker.Property taxes – Delhi versus CaliforniaFor those who argue that there is little room for rationalising the salary structure or increasing the tax base, the counterargument is right before our eyes: Look at the state of civic facilities in Indian cities and villages. Everywhere, the story is the same, sordid one: the roads are hellish, garbage is mountainous, taps usually run dry or the water carries a cocktail of dreadful disease-causing germs whenever it arrives, electricity supply is whimsical and government schools are horror stories. The reason for these tragedies is simple: local bodies are starved of both cash and employees.Also read: India’s Unequal Tax Structure: The Rich Pay Less, The Rest Get LessWhy are roads cleaned, garbage disposed like clockwork, water potable and schools really teaching in not just developed but even some economies of similar size as India’s? The reason, once again, is simple: they deploy adequate cash and workers to run civic works and supplies. The wealthy and the middle classes in those countries pay taxes in proportion to the value of the properties they own.For instance, if a property is sold for $2 million in California, the property tax is $20,000 per annum: 1% of the property value. The logic is that if someone can afford to buy a 2 million dollar property, they can well afford to pay that much tax. This tax is collected by local bodies and spent directly on schools and other civic amenities.In India, the wealthy and the upper-middle classes pay ridiculously low taxes. For instance, the tax on a residential property in Greater Kailash Part II with a covered area of 2,000 square meters and valued at about Rs 50 crore rupees is not calculated based on market value. Instead, it is based on the covered built-up area and fixed municipal rates. It will be about Rs 1.5 lakhs per year, which works out to a mere 0.03% of the total property value.Governments are short of money because they have deliberately chosen to put themselves in that position. Yes, the registration fee and the stamp duties are kept artificially high, but that only ensures a steady supply of black money at every level of a property transaction.Property taxes are the tip of the iceberg. French economist Thomas Piketty is right: there are several ways to tax the wealthy and the propertied equitably in India. But it will never happen. We are so used to the current state of affairs that we just don’t bother, else we try to justify it by making fancy academic arguments. Even a marginal increase in taxes will lead to howls from the wealthy and the upper-middle class, and the media will stand behind them solidly.The toiling masses of India remain at a subsistence level and will always remain there, so long as they do not understand the game being played by governments that are certainly not ‘theirs’.P.A. Krishnan is an author in English and Tamil. With a postgraduate degree in physics from Presidency College, Madras and experience in academia, the civil service and scientific institutions, he writes frequently on science and public life.